The following guidelines were developed over 1992-93 by the CLA Committee on the Status of Women, and were adopted in 1994. These guidelines are designed to make people more aware of issues surrounding women and language. The editors of the Proceedings of the CLA take them into account in preparing the proceedings of the annual meeting.

Sexist practices are those that contribute to demeaning or ignoring or stereotyping women; sexism is not a matter of intention but of effect. There is now a considerable body of research that documents sexism in a wide range of professional activities, including scholarly writing. Although linguists (like all scholars) need to guard against sexist linguistic and scholarly practices in their main texts and accompanying citations and acknowledgements, sexism in the linguistics literature is most often obvious in example sentences. Sometimes this is the result of an effort to inject humour in otherwise dry prose; sometimes it is simply due to lack of attention.

The CLA and its members adopt the following guidelines to help eliminate sexist language in the CLA’s documents and publications and in other linguistics writing and, we hope, in talks and conference papers. The guidelines identify and prohibit some of the most problematic practices. The general guidelines apply to all kinds of writing, including constructed examples; specific guidelines are also included for example sentences and acknowledgements. For fuller discussion and a much more comprehensive set of guidelines that offers help with alternatives, see:

Use parallel forms of reference for women and men; e.g. do not cite a male scholar by surname only and a female scholar by first name plus surname or construct examples with a cast of characters like executive ‘Mr. Smith’ and his secretary ‘Mary’.

Avoid gender stereotyped or demeaning characterizations; e.g. presenting men as actors and women as passive recipients of others’ actions. Men are frequently the agents, women the recipients, of violent acts. We recommend the portrayal of violent acts be avoided altogether regardless of the sex or species of the participant.
The verb kiss is sometimes employed as an alternative to verbs which refer to more violent acts; this use, combined with sexist practices in naming participants, results in heterosexist bias as well as sexist bias, e.g. ‘All the boys kissed Mary.’

Avoid peopling your examples exclusively with one sex.

Avoid consistently putting reference to males before females. Not only does this order convey male precedence, in English and French it will put males in subject position and women in object position (see 2). These problems can sometimes be avoided by using names that are completely sex-ambiguous (e.g. Chris, Dana, Kim, Lee, Pat). However, caution should be used when employing these names, since they will be assigned gender by the reader where the content of sentences contains gender stereotypes.

Avoid sexist (or otherwise derogatory) content in examples (e.g. ‘The man who beats his mistress will regret it sooner than the man who beats his wife’ – slight revision of actual example).

In glossing forms from another language, do not introduce gender-specificity or asymmetry absent in the original. For example, sentences referring to a specific individual without overt pronouns, e.g. Japanese, or with a sex-indefinite pronoun, e.g. Finnish, are incorrectly translated into English (and into French) with the pronoun he (or il), which unambiguously conveys maleness in reference to specific individuals.Note: Some sexist usage in constructed examples persists because of the real advantages to using familiar example sentences to illustrate a particular linguistic phenomenon (witness ‘donkey’ pronouns, so christened because of an example used in the first discussion of the phenomenon). There are really only a very few cases where a particular example is so familiar as to be virtually obligatory in discussing a certain phenomenon; we recommend citing the original source and proposing a close but nonsexist alternative.

In English, avoid so-called masculine generics such as the pronoun he (his, etc.) with sex-indefinite antecedents or man and its compounds (except in unambiguous reference to males). In French, avoid l’homme and les hommes (except in unambiguous reference to males).
Although such forms have long been endorsed by prescriptive grammarians, in current usage they are not interpreted as unproblematically including both sexes equally, and tend to suggest that the default human being is male.

In French, avoid so-called generic occupational titles (avocat, etc.). Use masculine ones when referring to a man (avocat) and their feminine equivalent when referring to a woman (avocate). When sex is indefinite, use both (les étudiants et les étudiantes de première annee, les étudiant(e)s, etc.). Feminine equivalents for masculine titles follow the morphological rules of the language. Avoid compounds with femme (femme médecin, etc.) which have the same connotations as English compounds with woman or lady (see 11a).

In French, the masculine and feminine forms of certain pronouns may be used together (ceux et celles qui s’intéressent à la linguistique, etc.).

In both French and English, avoid using genuine generics as if they referred only to males (e.g. ‘Speakers use language for many purposes – to argue with their wives…’ or ‘Americans use lots of obscenities but not around women’).

In English, avoid adding modifiers or suffixes to nouns to mark sex referents unnecessarily. Such usage promotes continued sexual stereotyping in one of two ways:

By highlighting referent sex, modification can signal a general presupposition that referents will be of the other sex (lady professor,male secretary) and thus that these referents are aberrant.

Conventionalized gender-marking ‘naturalizes’ the presumptive or unmarked sex of the noun’s referents (stewardess,changing lady). In French, the tendency is the opposite; where they exist, feminine equivalents are to be preferred (see 8).

Ask yourself whether you have remembered to cite or acknowledge women as well as men whose own research is relevant or whose comments may have helped you (see also 1 above).
Given traditional views of men’s and women’s place in intellectual endeavour, there is a danger that ideas advanced by women and adopted by men will be remembered as having originated with men, and that more generally, women’s intellectual contributions tend to be underestimated.